Red Army Faction Is Suspected in German Killing

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The police said today that they believed that the Red Army Faction, the far-left German guerrilla group, was responsible for the killing of an industrialist late Monday night.

The killer left behind a note bearing the rifle-and-star insignia of the Red Army. A federal prosecutor, Alexander von Stahl, said his investigators believed that the note was genuine.

The industrialist, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, 58 years old, was killed by shots fired into his Dusseldorf home shortly before midnight Monday. His wife was wounded, but the police said her injuries were not life-threatening.

Since July, Mr. Rohwedder had served as head of the Treuhandanstalt, or Public Trustee, a Government agency charged with overseeing the economic transition of eastern Germany. The Treuhand, as it is known, has been heavily criticized on the ground that it has been callous toward workers in the east.

"It is a signal showing the extent of the tension and irrational violence that is building up," said Wolfgang Ullmann, a member of Parliament from the eastern province of Saxony.

Justice Minister Klaus Kinkel and Finance Minister Theo Waigel both rushed home from vacations upon hearing of the killing. Chancellor Helmut Kohl, on vacation in Austria, was said to have been shocked.

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Since Mr. Rohwedder took over the Treuhand last July, it has ordered the closing of more than 300 companies in eastern Germany, all of them deemed unable to compete in a free market. Many easterners blame the Treuhand for policies that have thrown thousands of their neighbors out of work and threaten tens of thousands more.

The note left by Mr. Rohwedder's killer on Monday night did not refer directly to either the victim or the agency he headed. It was instead a radical denunciation of capitalism and its abuse of the "three continents" of the developing world.

"Freedom is only possible in the liberating struggle," the note said. "We are building revolutionary power to confront the imperialist beast. Struggle for human dignity and against the reactionary plans of greater Germany and Western Europe to subjugate and exploit people here and on the three continents."

At the end of the note was the signature, "Red Army Faction: Ulrich Wessel Commando." Ulrich Wessel was a terrorist killed in 1975 during an assault on the German Embassy in Stockholm.

The Red Army Faction, formerly known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, carried out a series of dramatic kidnappings and killings in the 1970's and 1980's. It proclaimed a violently anti-capitalist ideology, and many of its victims were prominent businessmen. The most recent was Alfred Herrhausen, a banker, who was killed by a car bomb in November 1989. Help From the Stasi

In recent months, evidence has emerged suggesting that the Red Army Faction was sheltered, financed, trained and supplied by East Germany's now-dissolved secret police force, the Stasi. Several terrorist suspects were arrested in eastern Germany after the collapse of the Communist Government there in 1989.

A version of this article appears in print on April 3, 1991, on Page A00005 of the National edition with the headline: Red Army Faction Is Suspected in German Killing. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe